Colorful shoes squeak on the floor as a basketball dances between the ground and a pair of hands. Suddenly, senior Advay Monga finds the ball hurled in his direction. Before he can think, he catches the ball and sends it arcing into the basket. It might only be three points for Harker, but to Advay, every moment on the court reflects the hundreds of hours he has dedicated to the sport since his childhood.

“In first grade, I dressed up as Kobe Bryant for Halloween,” Advay said. “That was the real spark. That was also the first time I started watching basketball. After the 2015 NBA Finals, I fell in love with the game. It was inspirational to see how far the players had gotten in life, their discipline and all that goes into becoming a professional athlete.”

In an effort to emulate the stars he saw on the screen, Advay started playing basketball with his friends in elementary school. As Advay grew physically and skill-wise, he progressed to increasingly higher levels of the sport, notably to varsity basketball in his sophomore year. Despite experiencing highlights like winning the James Lick Tournament, Advay recalls spending his first season adapting to a seemingly evolved version of a familiar sport.

“The transition from JV to varsity was definitely really hard for me because of the gap in athleticism and skill between players,” Advay said. “There’s a lot of pressure, so you have to be more composed when you play. If you’re not, you make a lot of mistakes and turn the ball over.”

To close the gap between himself and the varsity level, Advay trained weights to improve his athleticism, practiced additional hours in the gym to fine-tune his shot and stuck to a diet that would fuel him throughout the season. While Advay emphasizes his own improvement, he also stresses the importance of teamwork in basketball.

“Rather than being an individual sport, there’s a lot of emphasis in basketball on the team,” Advay said. “When I first started playing, so did all my friends, and that was the factor that really brought us closer. Even after a lot of them left basketball, I met new people from other grades. That certainly helps me outside the court when I interact and work with others.”

Advay’s junior year biology teacher Eric Johnson observed his tendency to collaborate with other peers. Throughout his lectures, Johnson often asks their students to discuss new concepts in their lab groups, and Advay’s open, active participation caught his eye.

“Advay is a guy who is comfortable turning to his partner and talking absolutely anything out,” Johnson said. “This is a guy who has leadership qualities and is frankly kind. He brings his questions, brings his learning and helps people around him learn.”

Ever since close friend senior Rahul Yalla met Advay in third grade, the two have been inseparable both on the basketball court and among their friend group. When the pair aren’t playing one-on-one, they often lounge in the athletic training room during lunch and afterschool, chatting over video games. 

“Advay and I just click,” Rahul said. “He’s always been very competitive and he’s someone you can always rely on to uphold that competitive drive in any situation. He’s athletic, he’s good at spikeball and basketball, but he’s also one of the smartest people I know. He’s able to quickly but really logically think out problems of the week in class, and he always solves any riddle in front of him.”

Advay’s inquisitive motivation extends to his more personal hobby, the electric guitar. Advay picked up the instrument in first grade and played intermittently throughout elementary and middle school, working on songs by professional guitarists he admired such as Eric Johnson. Originally playing around with covers of pop songs, Advay has moved to more guitar-focused pieces and has even expanded into genres like classical.

“I’ve always wanted the end goal of being able to play guitar really well,” Advay said. “But at the beginning, I did the minimum. Guitar takes a lot of time and I wasn’t willing to put in that time. I quit for a year. But then when I picked it up again during COVID, I only played because I really liked it. I got better, and it was a great creative art and a stress reliever.”

Throughout his four years on campus, Advay could be found in many places: in the gym working on his three-pointer, in his room fiddling with chord progressions or in a biology classroom studying the human heart. Uniting the tapestry of his interests is an innate drive that continually motivates him year after year. Many students, athletes and musicians find it easy to muster short bursts of energy, but Advay’s success in these fields lies in his continual commitment to each one.

“For me, discipline can only happen when I try the things that I really like,” Advay said. “Since I like basketball and I like guitar, I’m willing to contribute to the discipline. It’s not really discipline at that point — it’s passion.”